Days after the anniversary of the investment bank’s collapse, its shares are seeing an uncanny amount of trading activity.

The stock’s high was 23 cents yesterday, with 65 million shares changing hands during the first five hours of trading. The stock ultimately closed at around 22 cents– up nearly 40 percent on the day, with volume of more than 94 million shares.

It’s a fairly impressive rally for a firm that choked on toxic assets last September 15 and has been relegated to over-the-counter trading under the ticker symbol LEHMQ.

Traders speculate that the Lehman stock surge has been fueled by a belief that the bank, which still houses hundreds of billions in soured mortgage assets and esoteric derivatives, may have enough juice left in it to return at least some money to shareholders.

Supporting that view has been the recent sale of claims on Lehman’s assets and derivative contracts where Lehman acted as counter-party. The company has accumulated some $6 billion in cash from derivative contracts and investors are hoping that Lehman might be able to fetch more.

Still, Lehman is expecting to have hundreds of billions in claims, which would leave next to nothing for shareholders.

This marks the second time the stock has spiked over the past several weeks. Lehman’s shares had a similar run-up in late August on volume of 125 million shares.